Layoffs: The Anger Stage

Yesterday was about shock. Trying to gather information. Trying to simply comprehend.

Today is the next phase: Anger. I know what happened. I can’t fathom why and the company I hired on to 10 years ago seems gone.

Stretching back to Lexmark days, every layoff has been either about (1) culling low performers or (2) axing large swathes of people from a failed strategy. Those make sense, and one can even predict them. For about 5 years there, Lexmark didn’t even manage low-performers at all, so layoffs were the only way Bob down the hall who couldn’t code his way out of a Perl script was going to go away.

I became callous and immune to them, because deep down inside, they needed to happen.

Yesterday? I don’t know man. The rhyme or reason escapes me.

If you want to compete you want your best people happy, challenged, and motivated. You want them to feel like they have autonomy, that they’re moving towards mastery of their profession (status!), and that there’s purpose to their work. They’re not just diggig a ditch and filling it in at the end of the day to no purpose.

We’re really moving away from all the above. Since 2023, managers have been taking attendance of all reports. Recently that same dashboard is flagging people that aren’t in the office long enough. Everywhere I’ve worked it’s been “manage your own time” (read: work loads of uncompensated overtime because we won’t manage your time). Fair enough, but that’s not the messaging I see.

Mastery: Then Don’t fire the most talented SDE we have.

Purpose: We had a purpose in my organization–customer satisfaction. We were proud of it. We’ve been told that purpose is garbage based on the metrics and KPIs.

Oh well, the above is predictable based on working for a cost center in a corporation, not a profit center. I made the same mistake at Lexmark (Software and Drivers always got cut. Every. Damned. Year.).